EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
An advocacy group is blaming the Ford government for the troubling situation at an autism therapy centre near Barrie, Ont., where a convicted sex offender was living when he and his wife were arrested on new charges this week.
Lauriston Charles Maloney, 42, and Amber Maloney, 36, were arrested and charged Wednesday with human trafficking and related offences. They both made video court appearances Friday and will return to court to seek bail.
Police have said the victim — who is now in a place of safety and being provided support — was not an attendee of the Beating the Odds therapy centre or day camp, which Amber Maloney owned and operated at the rural property located just northeast of Ivy, Ont.
But families of children with autism are alarmed that Lauriston Maloney, who had a previous conviction for child trafficking and was a registered sex offender, had access to the centre.
"These are families who've been waiting years for help," said Alina Cameron, president of the Ontario Autism Coalition (OAC). "Imagine being on a waitlist for services for your child who is struggling every day, for five or more years. You finally think you find the right place, and your child's potentially been put in danger. It is shocking."
While the Ontario Provincial Police could not confirm how long Lauriston Maloney was living at the home-based autism centre, land registry records show that the couple purchased the property on Feb. 4, 2022, for $2.8 million.
The OAC blames the Ford government for vulnerable children being put in harm's way.
"We think that we're in this difficult time as a community because of a number of converging factors that are all the direct result of the massive Ontario autism program delays," said Cameron.
Those factors go back to the Ford government's decision to revamp the autism program after taking office in 2018, dismantling the program the previous Liberal government had begun implementing in favour of providing direct payments to parents based on children's age before changing course again in the face of widespread protests.
The new Ontario Autism Program has been late to roll out and the resulting uncertainty has caused problems for reputable autism services providers, which haven't been able to invest in human resources and programming.
"The delays in the program have made it very difficult for them to keep the lights on," Cameron said.
Some, like ErinoakKids, have cut their programming.
However, money has recently begun flowing to some new families after years of waiting.
"So you have families who are desperate for care and can't find it, so they might be settling on something that might not be the best option, or shouldn't be an option at all," she said.
Some more disreputable centres have sprung up advertising applied behaviour analysis (ABA) therapy, but their staff aren't trained, so "families are paying hundreds of dollars per hour for basically babysitting," said Cameron, adding her group has noted similar complaints about the Beating the Odds Centre aired online.
In 2019, then-Social Services Minister Todd Smith promised that the province would regulate applied behaviour analysis providers, but that has yet to materialize. Two years later, the province has passed legislation that will enable the College of Psychologists to regulate the field. As of this spring, the college published an update saying it is waiting for the Ministry of Health to approve related regulatory amendments and it did not have a timeline for when regulation would begin.
The OAC hopes that regulation will prevent a similar situation from happening again and reign in more common problems, such as families being overcharged. In the meantime, parents of children with autism are navigating the system on their own, said Cameron.
"Unfortunately, we're going to be in a position where a lot of a lot of families are going to find themselves in precarious situations," she added.
The OAC has some advice for families trying to choose a provider for their child: ask for criminal record checks and the educational background of all people with access to the centre, and check therapists' credentials through the Behavior Analyst Certification Board.
Village Media reached out to the office of Social Services Minister Michael Parsa, the fourth minister on the portfolio since the Ford government was first elected in 2018, to ask if the minister accepted any fault.
“The fact that this individual was released into the public without conditions and slipped through the cracks is a failure of our justice system. When we learned of the OPP public safety advisory, the government immediately took action by issuing a protection order," said Parsa's spokesperson, Patrick Bissett, in an email reply.
"This man should have never been allowed around vulnerable children, and we are thankful to the OPP for their swift action in this case.”
Bissett also said the province does not fund Beating the Odds directly and that any funding provided to families through the Ontario Autism Program for services must be delivered by registered professionals and meet the program’s qualification requirements. According to an archived version of the Beating the Odds website, the company had at least one board-certified therapist on staff.
The statement did not address questions about plans to regulate ABA therapy.
The provincial government has been involved with the Beating the Odds Centre since the OPP first issued a public warning about it on July 17.
Officials from the Ministry of Education attended the property Tuesday, July 18, at which time they issued a protection order, which stated that “upon conducting an inspection, I believe on reasonable grounds that there is an imminent threat to the health, safety, or welfare of any children for whom child care is provided” and ordering the centre to immediately stop providing childcare.
A statement from Ontario’s solicitor general’s office emailed to Village Media on July 19 urged all parents to “keep away” from the facility.
“This individual who was convicted of such reprehensible crimes should never be around vulnerable children again. Allowing him to roam freely around our communities and potentially put more children in danger is a failure of our justice system. Working with law enforcement we have served a protection order on this unlicensed facility prohibiting this individual from being on the premises while children in care are present and would encourage all parents to keep away from this facility,” read the statement.
The Maloneys were arrested and charged that day.
— With files from Nikki Cole of BarrieToday